


imagine there's no heaven

by RaisingCaiin



Series: RC's Back to Middle-earth Month 2020 [6]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Backpacking across Beleriand, Ecological Warfare, Gen, Illness, Post-War of Wrath, Quests, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23121907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisingCaiin/pseuds/RaisingCaiin
Summary: Findaráto is able to slip away in all the confusion following the War of Wrath, and he makes his way east across Beleriand into new lands, not expecting the horror that will follow behind him.(for the B2MeM prompt 3/9/2020:At last, weary and feeling finally defeated, he sat on a step below the level of the passage-floor and bowed his head into his hands. It was quiet, horribly quiet. The torch, that was already burning low when he arrived, sputtered and went out; and he felt the darkness cover him like a tide. And then softly, to his own surprise, there at the vain end of his long journey and his grief, moved by what thought in his heart he could not tell, Sam began to sing. (Return of the King, Book VI, Chapter 1))(ALSO, I've finally given in and made this a series of loosely-connected oneshots, since so many of my ficlets for B2MeM are about this story!)
Series: RC's Back to Middle-earth Month 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653583
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23
Collections: Back to Middle-earth Month 2020: Endings and Beginnings





	imagine there's no heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [where i can't follow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23099095) by [starlightwalking](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlightwalking/pseuds/starlightwalking). 



> Now part of a series of loosely-connected oneshots (see "soldier, keep on marching on" series for some semblance of order). And this one is directly inspired by starlightwalking/arofili's recent fic, in which Finrod and Edrahil have a heart-breaking talk about death and re-embodiment. Linked above, and omg you should definitely read it. . .

The Iron Hells are eventually razed and the Moringotto is dragged from His lair, screeching and scrabbling at the walls as Eönwë pulls His stinking form out into the smoky daylight. His lieutenant is nowhere to be found in the resulting chaos, and the two surviving sons of Fëanor materialize from the smoke to cause further havoc by demanding their father's recovered jewels, but at least Findaráto is able to slip away in all the confusion.

For this war was not his primary reason for returning to Middle-earth, of course – he has had more than enough of battle and its aftermath for one lifetime, let alone too. No, Findaráto is here to make good on a promise, and so he sets off walking.

He has a map of sorts, and it serves him well enough for the first leg of his journey, crossing Himlad and striking out south and east toward Thargelion. While Himlad is not tame land, and he knows the names of its landmarks mostly from his cousins' tales, at least these things do exist in the records of the Noldor; from their cold unfriendly plains, Findaráto plans to strike into the Ered Lindon, the mountains at whose feet he once met Balan, what feels like several lifetimes ago. The Blue Mountains, though, are as far East as Findaráto has ever been; once he reaches them now, anywhere that he ventures beyond is unmapped, unknown.

He hitches his pack a little higher on his back, feeling his provisions and the plain harp settle a little more evenly against his shoulders, and lets out a quick breath. _It will be an adventure,_ he tells himself. And what is more, a journey with no kingdom lying at his back this time that he must hurry back and rule.

Night by night, the stars grow stranger. _We praised his stars_ , a familiar voice seems to murmur in his mind as Findaráto stretches out across the cool green grass to try and map them. The stars resist his efforts easily.

 _We needed no Tree-light,_ that remembered voice continues. _We know no Varda_. When spread beneath that voice in the confines of Nargothrond, or venturing beyond the city's walls with its owner to walk off the worst of his restlessness, Findaráto had never put stock in such stories, beloved though their teller was. Instead, the stars had always seemed familiar lights, and although he had only ever seen Varda once – as a boy, from a distance at one of the Vanyarin festivals of light – Findaráto has never had difficulty imagining his people's most beloved Lady scattering Her radiant lights across the sky to cheer and guide them.

But that is not so of the stars he sees when he reaches the feet of the Ered Lindon. These stars are beautiful and bright but strange and distant; as far from Findaráto as the One must be, and as unknowable too. A tremor shudders through his skin, and it does not come from the cold or the damp of the place where he lies. If Findaráto is to love these stars, he thinks distantly, it is precisely because they are unapproachable; because he will never know them as more than the glow he sees of them now.

He finds himself wondering if this is what Edrahil had meant, that night so long ago, when he had said that the Eldar were blind to the starlight. Wonders if perhaps his lover had meant that his sundered brethren had grown too familiar with the wonders of the world, in trying to put names and creators to them.

He – he will ask Edrahil when he sees him again, Findaráto vows, before sitting up to adjust his cloak and better ward off the tremors. Save that, once he is upright, he realizes that the movement is not in him, but in the ground beneath him. And as he takes to his feet, alarmed, the land groans, cracking beneath his feet, and Findaráto can hear the roar of the sea to the west, though he _knows_ that all of Beleriand should lie between him and the great water.

But the Sea does not care what Findaráto thinks he knows of its place and position. He can smell the brine of it, hear the roar of it, as it seems to pour across the lands behind him, driving him further into the mountains. And when the morning comes, and Findaráto looks back into the western lands from which he came, he sees that the Sea has indeed come upon him. Thargelion, Ossiriand, and all the lands beyond them have vanished, and now the angry waters bite out a new coast, torn right into the floodplains of the Ered Lindon.

Beleriand has been washed away behind him, and Findaráto's eyes sting as he tries to take in the enormity of it all.

He wonders, with a feeling too distant and distinct from himself to even be horror, whether the Valar and their armies did anything to save those who lived upon those lands now sunk – the Men, the Sindar, the Silvans, the Khazad, the creatures, who held no truck with the Moringotto but were simply struggling to live their lives. Have all of these been washed away too?

He knows what the answer must be, and the surety of that knowledge burns like an ember in his chest. 

_We know Arum, the Hunter, but we hid from his face,_ that remembered voice murmurs. _When he at last beheld us in all his terror, we knew we should have stayed hidden._

Findaráto turns and flees further into the Ered Lindon, the horror of what he knows that he has just seen finally catching up with him and snapping at his heels like a hound possessed. From its new resting place behind him, the Sea thunders its challenge.

A strange time follows.

Findaráto wanders without knowing where it is that he goes, only that he follows the track of the sun as it rises, walks away from it as it sets. (He cannot think of the day-light as Arien's chariot anymore – his mind refuses to think of the Valar or their creatures now.) He eats what he can hunt or gather, eschewing the rations he brought with him; his eyes slowly grow accustomed to the half-light of thicker forests, where the pines grow so heavy that their needles carpet the ground and their heights blot out the sun. Every night he waits, shivering, for the Sea to rise again, to come cascading over the Ered Lindon and pull more of the land into its hungry maw.

He stumbles, one day, and he must lean against the nearest tree to catch his breath. His skin has burned with an odd and unfamiliar heat, the past few days, but he cannot think what it might be and he only knows that he must press forward. Death lies behind him, choppy-watered and stinking of brine, and someone waits for him in the eastern forests ahead. This is all he knows. This is all he knows.

If he can only set one foot ahead of the other – and again – and again –

He falls, in the middle of a clearing where there are no trees to lend him strength, and he cannot find the strength to rise again.

And so he lies where he fell.

The darkness of the night rushes over him like the Sea across Beleriand, strong enough to drag him under and hold him there, drown him there, while the stars that he can see beyond the tips of the pines simply watch, looking on like so many unfamiliar eyes as the stranger beneath them succumbs to some alien force they do not understand. Findaráto smiles, weak and shaking, at the thought, and lets his eyes fall shut. A tear, scalding hot, slips from beneath his lashes and steals its way down his burning cheek.

He cannot reach his harp, and besides, there is no one here to hear it; he has not seen another soul in weeks. But it seems impolite, somehow, to slip into the night and the grief and the fever – distantly, he remembers that this was the name Balan had given his own common affliction – without a farewell of some sort. For he does not know if he will be able to escape the West again, if he dies here; does not know if he will be able to come looking for the one he came to find.

To his own dim surprise, a song of some sort manages to rise from his throat – words, and a melody, that these middle-lands (for Beleriand is no more, and someday there must be a new name for what remains) will not have heard in centuries. It is an old marching song that Findaráto had heard sung among the guards in some hidden kingdom of stone, once upon a time; he'd always suspected that it had to have come from somewhere beyond of the kingdom itself, for none of the songs of the Eldar asked the listener to imagine that there was no heaven, no hell, nothing to kill or die for, but only the sky and stars serene above a world of folk who lived and hunted in peace.

But the words and the tune slip from his numb lips before he can get far, and Findaráto has fallen into darkness before he can hear another voice somewhere nearby pick up the song.


End file.
